Danilova Bequest Is a Thank-You to New York

By JENNIFER DUNNING

Published: November 28, 1988

Alexandra Danilova, who was 84 years old on Nov. 20, has decided to celebrate with a gift to someone else. Miss Danilova will donate to the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library the paintings, sculptures, costume sketches and set designs she has acquired during a career of some six decades as an internationally acclaimed prima ballerina and dance teacher.

The collection, which will go to the library on Miss Danilova's death, includes work by such noted designers as Nathalia Goncharova, Eugene Berman, Andre Derain, Oliver Smith, Christian Berard, Mstislav Doboujinsky and Rouben Ter-Arutunian. There also are 19th-century dance prints, photographs and souvenir programs from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with which she danced from 1938 to 1952.

Many of the items depict Miss Danilova in her most famous roles, including the Glove Seller in Leonide Massine's ''Gaite Parisienne,'' the Street Dancer in Massine's ''Beau Danube'' and Odette in ''Swan Lake.'' ''As I am a dancer, I put myself here,'' Miss Danilova said in a recent interview, gesturing to the walls of her Manhattan apartment.

An entire career is spanned. There is a portrait of Miss Danilova as a very young, big-eyed and gravely formal teen-ager in a favorite hat, taken during the years she studied at the ballet school of the Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Posters commemorate her recent career of staging ballet classics for companies around the world, and a photograph shows Miss Danilova conferring with George Balanchine and John Taras on the New York City Ballet's 1974 production of ''Coppelia,'' which she choreographed with Balanchine. 'A Beautiful Garden'

''I have a collection that was given to me in appreciation and I think to have that beauty at home is very nice,'' Miss Danilova said. ''It's like a beautiful garden.'' She decided to give her treasures to the Dance Collection in appreciation of her popularity in New York City, where, today, she teaches five classes a week at the School of American Ballet, which is affiliated with the New York City Ballet. The gift is also in recognition of the importance of the research collection, one of the world's major dance archives.

''I would like to have all the paintings in one room,'' Miss Danilova said of her gift to the library. ''It would be sort of a portrait of a dancer. Not only a silly girl who wiggled her hips but someone who appreciated beauty.'' Miss Danilova will be one of the people honored in a private ceremony tonight at a preview of the ''Design, Vision, Dance: Four Decades of the New York City Ballet,'' an exhibition at the library's Vincent Astor Gallery.

There are few items from her years with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. ''We were traveling,'' she said. ''We had no basic apartment. But you know I think it's through Diaghilev that I got the idea to collect. He'd always send us to exhibitions.'' Diaghilev talked to the dancers about painting, as well. ''Also George was telling me about it,'' Miss Danilova said, referring to Balanchine, with whom she lived from 1925 to 1930.

Miss Danilova later bought artwork, but always, she recalled, for its intrinsic appeal rather than as an investment. She does regret, however, not buying a Picasso plate on sale for $25 in the south of France. ''I just didn't have the money,'' she said. Then there was the mysterious portrait by a young Paris painter of a bare-breasted woman holding up a green taffeta dress. ''She wanted to put it on,'' Miss Danilova said gently. ''But this was a change of her life. So she was taking it off.'' Dressing-Room Visitors

Many of the items were given to Miss Danilova. ''He come to my dressing room,'' she said when asked about one donor. ''Everybody come to my dressing room. That's how I know everybody.'' Some were friends and some strangers. She remembers one gift-giving admirer vividly. ''He was a prince,'' she recalled. ''You'd think a prince would be thin and young, but he was old and fat.''

Miss Danilova at first claimed no favorites among the items. ''Everything is precious,'' she said. ''I like everything.'' On reflection, however, she pointed to the painting by Goncharova of St. Francis of Assisi that hangs over her couch. ''It was one of the costumes for a ballet with liturgy and a choir,'' she said. ''It was a little religious. Probably, I presume, putting two and two together, Diaghilev couldn't find a choreographer for it.''

There are six paintings by Berman with such inscriptions as ''Homage a la Danilova,'' ''To darling Choura'' and ''To Alexandra Danilova, prima ballerina assoluta and a very nice woman as well.'' ''Berman always gave me something for my birthday,'' she said. ''He was a little grumpy. He wasn't easy, I will say. But he was very talented, with wonderful taste, because he did a lot of things for the opera.''

Doboujinsky is represented by a delicate little set design for Tanya Chamie's ''Birthday'' and by a painting in brilliant hues of the Neva River at sunset. But several of the most appealing paintings in the collection are by lesser-known artists, among them Esmond Knight, with whom Miss Danilova performed in ''The Great Waltz'' in London in 1931, and Will Rapport, who captured Miss Danilova at her most wittily flirtatious in a portrait from ''Gaite Parisienne. 'I Don't Like Dolls'

There is a lyrical little pencil-and-pastel portrait of Miss Danilova in ''Swan Lake,'' by Rosario Hudson. ''She was an Irish artist,'' Miss Danilova said. Miss Hudson also made dolls, which the ballerina has given as gifts to friends. ''I don't like dolls,'' she exclaimed. ''To me, they're like dead people.''

The pleasure of the collection is increased by taking a tour through it with the irrepressible Miss Danilova. ''Hamburgers in her ears,'' she said, pointing to the hair coiled artfully over a dancer's ears in a drawing by Kate Lehman.

''I really look like horse in circus,'' she said, pointing to her feathered head in a Berard costume from Balanchine's first ''Mozartiana.'' A handsome Ballet Russe poster by Robert Davison reminds her that ''somehow they choose another one so I pick up this very quickly.''

Miss Danilova recalled that a Berard costume sketch for Massine's ''Symphonie Fantastique'' was given to her by Serge Denham, a notoriously difficult impresario and director of the Ballet Russe. ''A peace offering?'' a friend asked. ''I deserved it,'' Miss Danilova said firmly. A child played the role of Amour, depicted in the sketch. ''She was a pain in the neck, that little girl,'' Miss Danilova said. ''There are nice little girls and pains in the neck, and she was a pain in the neck.''

And, looking at a quaint early Victorian print, one of a pair, of ''Madame Auriol as Colombine,'' she added that ''Freddy has the other.'' Frederic Franklin, her longtime ballet partner, she was asked? Miss Danilova nodded. ''I have only one Freddy,'' she answered simply.

''So this is my birthday present to the collection,'' she observed at last, surveying the walls crowded with art. ''What she is really doing is making a gift of herself,'' the friend observed. ''That's very nicely put,'' Miss Danilova said.